NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

cache tries to determine the characteristics of the memory hierarchy.
It attempts to determine the number of caches, the size of each cache,
the line size for each cache, and the available memory parallelism at
each level in the memory hierarchy. The largest amount of memory it
will examine is len bytes.
cache first attempts to determine the number and size of caches by
measuring the memory latency for various memory sizes. Once it has
identified the various caches it then measures the latency,
parallelism, and line size for each cache. Unfortunately, determining
the cache size merely from latency is exceedingly difficult due to
variations in cache replacement and prefetching strategies.

BUGS

cache is an experimental benchmark and is known to fail on many
processors. In particular there are a large number of machines with
weird caching behavior that confuse cache and prevent it from
accurately determining the number and size of the various caches.